Vanilla OS 3 "Reunion"

Vanilla OS 3 “Reunion” is built on Debian with Linux kernel 7.1 and a Wayland-only GNOME 50 desktop. We covered the release when it shipped.

Reproducible builds

The more interesting of the two headline features is that most Vanilla OS system images can now be rebuilt from the same source and settings to produce bit-for-bit identical output.

Reproducible builds answer a question that is otherwise unanswerable: does the image you downloaded correspond to the source it claims to be built from? Without reproducibility you are trusting the build machine and everyone with access to it. With it, anyone can rebuild independently and compare hashes.

For an immutable distribution this is a particularly good fit, since the model is built on shipping and verifying complete system images rather than individual packages.

ARM64

Vanilla OS now offers official images for both x86_64 and ARM64, rather than leaving ARM to community builds.

Apx and the immutable escape hatch

On an immutable system you cannot simply apt install into the root filesystem. Apx is what makes Vanilla OS workable despite that: it manages containerized subsystems where you can install packages from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, or others, with applications integrating into your desktop.

# Create a subsystem and install into it
apx subsystems new --name dev --stack arch
apx run --name dev -- pacman -S neovim

It is conceptually similar to Distrobox and solves the same problem: atomic updates with a way to install arbitrary software that does not compromise them.

VSO, the Vanilla System Operator, handles system updates and maintenance tasks.

The desktop

GNOME 50, Wayland-only, with newer GTK4 defaults: Ptyxis as the terminal, Papers as the document viewer, Resources as the system monitor. Choosing those rather than shipping the legacy applications is a statement of intent about where the project is aiming.

Where it fits

The immutable desktop category is crowded, with Fedora Silverblue, the Universal Blue images including Bazzite, openSUSE Aeon, and NixOS approaching the same goal differently. Vanilla OS’s distinguishing choice is a Debian base plus multi-distribution container support, which is a reasonable niche if you want atomic updates without committing to Fedora’s ecosystem.

Verify Your Download

Checksums are published with each release on GitHub, and the reproducible build work means images can be independently rebuilt and compared.